“A dog will not be allowed to file and put its name on the ballot,” grumped Bryan Caskey, director of elections in the Secretary of State’s office. And, in fact, the Kansas City Star reported yesterday that the secretary had decided Woolley was out. Why? “There’s several laws that reference that the governor has to be an individual or a person,” Caskey said, “and so we are relying on that.” Well, maybe they are. And maybe it’s just a coincidence that the Secretary of State, Kris Kobach, is himself running for governor. Or is it?

Somebody needs to put their fetus on the ballot and see which way the Republicans will jump.

Isn't "Marlon Bundo" copyrighted by his wife, or is ok because it's a parody?

I'm pretty sure it's ok as a parody. I also think that they're smart enough not to sue John Oliver over this because he already has all the positive attention. Suing him over something as trivial as a small book (of which the profit goes to charity) will only put the Pence family in a bad (worse) light. It'll also ensure that whoever thinks "that looks like a nice fun book, but I'm not going to get a copy" will definitely order one on amazon right away.

Show of hands: How many of us only found out that the original book existed because John Oliver parodied it?

The original will probably sell many more copies than it otherwise would have, as a result. In part because people disgruntled by the parody will want to show support for the original by buying it. So I think everyone wins.

ObsessoMom wrote:Show of hands: How many of us only found out that the original book existed because John Oliver parodied it?

The original will probably sell many more copies than it otherwise would have, as a result. In part because people disgruntled by the parody will want to show support for the original by buying it. So I think everyone wins.

He only loses out if the book is bad. If it's good (or simply just ok) then it's money well spent in the same sense that money spent on any leisure interest is: It's money spent to give a fleeting amount of satisfaction.

(I mean, I think consumerism as a whole is bad in the sense that it doesn't make people happy in the way they assume it will, but that philosophical objection aside it could be win-win as Obsessomom says.)

Isn't "Marlon Bundo" copyrighted by his wife, or is ok because it's a parody?

I don't know that you could actually copyright this, because it's the name of, and based on the likeness of, a real rabbit. Copyrighting character names is one of those things that is kind of tricky legally anyway... the name itself can't actually be copyrighted, but the conceptualization of the character can. So I'm pretty sure you could write a story with a character named "Harry Potter" in it; but if your "Harry Potter" character is also a wizard, then you're likely to be infringing copyright.

You can copyright your own name. That would imply you could copyright the names of people and objects you are guardians of, e.g., you can copyright "American Pharoah", the latest triple crown winner. So it stands to reason Pence could copyright the name of his pet rabbit.

As an aside, anyone else find it odd that Trump is the first president without a pet? Does every animal hiss and screech when he enters a room?

There are some provisions from which one could infer that a non-human animal could not serve as governor, however. For example, in a couple of places the constitution uses the word “person” to refer to executive officers, and there is, for better or worse, authority that non-human animals are not “persons.

You can copyright your own name. That would imply you could copyright the names of people and objects you are guardians of, e.g., you can copyright "American Pharoah", the latest triple crown winner. So it stands to reason Pence could copyright the name of his pet rabbit.

As an aside, anyone else find it odd that Trump is the first president without a pet? Does every animal hiss and screech when he enters a room?

That's the way my dog reacts when he sees him on the TV - low growl and ears back.

"Does this smell like chloroform to you?""Google tells me you are not unique. You are, however, wrong."nɒʜƚɒɿ_nɒɿɘ

You can copyright your own name. That would imply you could copyright the names of people and objects you are guardians of, e.g., you can copyright "American Pharoah", the latest triple crown winner. So it stands to reason Pence could copyright the name of his pet rabbit.

As an aside, anyone else find it odd that Trump is the first president without a pet? Does every animal hiss and screech when he enters a room?

Now that Britain is leaving the EU, we may be losing our rights, our trade, our ability to feed ourselves, a large chunk of our economy, quite a lot of our workforce, easy travel and a few other things, but we're damn well getting our dark blue passports back. No longer shall we be forced to use dark red EU passports that aren't quite the same shade as our post boxes and phone boxes. We're going to have dark blue passports again, and they're going to be made in France. The British company making the red ones isn't getting the contract for the dark blue ones. That's going to an EU company.

I have been meaning to work out if I'm already too late to apply for a passport renewal that would be burgandy and 'European' still. I can't even recall if I ever had a blue passport, and I certainly have no attachment to that old symbol.

Now, that it is obvious the Russians played a part in breaking up the E.U. into more manageable bite sizes.Can your people strengthen their E.U. connections? For the Good of The Queen and everyone else, too.

Life is, just, an exchange of electrons; It is up to us to give it meaning.

We are all in The Gutter.Some of us see The Gutter.Some of us see The Stars.by mr. Oscar Wilde.

Those that want to Know; Know.Those that do not Know; Don't tell them.They do terrible things to people that Tell Them.

addams wrote:Now, that it is obvious the Russians played a part in breaking up the E.U. into more manageable bite sizes.Can your people strengthen their E.U. connections? For the Good of The Queen and everyone else, too.

Hey now, the anti-EU crowd has got the vote just the way they like it. You don't think they're going to let anyone change the outcome, do you?

I liked this characterization in the Los Angeles Times. (WARNING: it's the Los Angeles Times. Their website is highly annoying.)

Still, mission accomplished for a guy more daredevil than engineer, who drew more comparisons to the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote from his critics than he did to iconic stunt man Evel Knievel.

On the flat-earth thing:

He's always maintained that his mission [for this particular rocket] isn't to prove the Earth is flat.

"Do I believe the Earth is shaped like a Frisbee? I believe it is," he said. "Do I know for sure? No. That's why I want to go up in space."

That's his project for down the road. He wants to build a "Rockoon," a rocket that is carried into the atmosphere by a gas-filled balloon, then separated from the balloon and lit. This rocket would take Hughes about 68 miles up.

As we reported in November, Hughes converted to his flat-Earth beliefs only in recent years, not long after his first fundraising campaign netted just 0.2 percent of its goal. But then he announced his conversion — which he says he undertook after he "researched it for several months in between doing everything else" — and his fundraising numbers saw a significant uptick.

I see how it is.

"You are not running off with Cow-Skull Man Dracula Skeletor!" -Socrates

I always assumed modern flat-earthers were just a novel form of trolling - an absurd belief expressed sincerely simply to irritate. I got much less sure of that when I saw just how much they put their money where their mouth is.

(I still cling onto the hope that most are trolls knowingly exploiting Poe's law. Wonder how you could ever find out though?)

Go ahead and try to show the earth is round. It's harder than it looks, especially if you limit yourself to only the things and knowledge you personally can do or demonstrate (no space photos, for example). It's an interesting challenge.

My view is that the original ones do it for attention, on a subject for which there is no practical downside. Very few people make any choices in life for which personally knowing the shape of the earth matters. But since most people have simply accepted what they were taught in school, when faced with a challenge they are unable to back up their beliefs scientifically. So, it's possible to get them to go "hmmmm...." and then we're back to the first paragraph, and flat earth gains more followers.

Then there are the biblical nut cases, but if you can't pick and choose what to accept from the Holy Books, you also can't pick and choose what to reject from it.

Jose

Order of the Sillies, Honoris Causam - bestowed by charlie_grumbles on NP 859 * OTTscar winner: Wordsmith - bestowed by yappobiscuts and the OTT on NP 1832 * Ecclesiastical Calendar of the Order of the Holy Contradiction * Please help addams if you can. She needs all of us.

ucim wrote:Go ahead and try to show the earth is round. It's harder than it looks, especially if you limit yourself to only the things and knowledge you personally can do or demonstrate (no space photos, for example). It's an interesting challenge.

Airline schedules, is the way I quite liked. Unless you suspect the airlines of a) Having the capability of much faster flight than they publicise and yet b) deliberately dawdle on some routes then if you plot flight times between various parts of the world (especially, say Sydney to Lima, Lima to Bloemfontein and Bloemfontein to Sydney that cross from near-rim to near-rim on most FE models of Earth, to contrast with northern routes that are are clockwise/anti-clockwise nearer the hub and various lengthy cross-'equator' routes) you're forced to conclude that it's at the very least a wrap-around world, rather than a planar disc, and probably also folded in at both poles.

Naturally, those darned Theoretical Conspiritors probably do manipulate both the schedules and the published capabilities of all planes. And you ought to also know that They are only letting me tell you of the possibility of their deception as part of a complex multi-layer bluff, you know. They told me to tell you that, too. But not this. So if you don't hear from me for a while, I'm probably still in hiding. Probably on the other side of the world… the underside, that is.

ucim wrote:Go ahead and try to show the earth is round. It's harder than it looks, especially if you limit yourself to only the things and knowledge you personally can do or demonstrate (no space photos, for example). It's an interesting challenge.

It's enough for me that a conspiracy would be completely impossible. It's not just scientists (geologists, meteorologists, biologists, physicists etc.) who'd have to be in on it, but the media, pilots (both military and civilian), ship captains and countless other groups.

Indeed, it's information it'd be impossible to suppress. For example, this forum contains way more than enough people to prove the earth is round: Just get everyone to say whether it's day or night for them and plot it onto the claimed earth model. You'll see that it's day on half the sphere and night on the other no matter how many times you try it. I don't need to try this experiment personally to know that some forum somewhere must have and obviously nothing ever came of it.

And then there's the fact that, as you imply, it is indeed possible for groups as small as one or two people to do the science proving the earth is not flat. For example, place cameras looking into vertical narrow shafts such as wells and observe the angles of the shadows when the sun is high in the sky.

[Edit: Soupspoon's way is even easier, and can indeed be done by one person]

Conspiracies are only plausible if a very tiny group of people are involved. Once it's open to anyone in the world to discover the truth it's not plausible for the truth to be suppressed.

It's odd to me that that isn't the end of it though, and that clearly people are convinced to the extent of parting with hard-earned cash over it.

It is enough to just get on a tall building and verify to can see farther off to prove the world is not flat. Maybe it's oblong, maybe it changes from places to place, but it would definitively prove it's not flat.

I have written to them, offering to undertake the arduous voyage to phone them with azimuth and elevation of the Sun from various points in the Alps, along the Dalmatian coast, throught the Greek islands, along the south side of Cyprus, in all the national parks of Africa, near some fo the most spectacular sights in India, at lots of little villages in the Himalaya, all over Laos and Vietnam, at every little village I could find in New Zealand, at base-camp for the Inca Trail, on the edge of the Torres Del Paine NP in Chile and all the national parks of Argentina, near Ecuador's beautiful volcanoes and all along the Rocky Mountains. As soon as they get back to me with the funding and the phone number to ring, I'll start booking the tickets.

Sure, but saying "conspiracies are very unlikely" isn't the same as doing science. Airline schedules are good, but they rely on something somebody else is doing. (Oh, didn't you hear? There's no such thing as jet fuel - airliners run by compressed air.) Day/night works on a flat earth with a nearby sun (if you neglect that pesky sunset thing), and the vertical shaft thing relies on the sun being far away too. Can you show (by yourself) how far away the sun is? Have you ever done it?

And that's the thing. Most people haven't done it; they take the word of their science teachers (and the rest of the sane world).

There are a few prominent flat earthers who have recanted at least part of their position based on experiments they have done at the behest of others (or experiments that others have you-tubed), so this tells me that they are at least sincere and receptive, if not convinced. And for those people, who you-tube and influence others, the thing to do is to show them how to do science right, without snow, and without ridicule.

And Zohar, yes, that should be a clue. Refraction makes it more complicated though - from low down you can actually see farther than geometrically possible.

Jose

Order of the Sillies, Honoris Causam - bestowed by charlie_grumbles on NP 859 * OTTscar winner: Wordsmith - bestowed by yappobiscuts and the OTT on NP 1832 * Ecclesiastical Calendar of the Order of the Holy Contradiction * Please help addams if you can. She needs all of us.

ucim wrote:Go ahead and try to show the earth is round. It's harder than it looks, especially if you limit yourself to only the things and knowledge you personally can do or demonstrate (no space photos, for example). It's an interesting challenge.

My view is that the original ones do it for attention, on a subject for which there is no practical downside. Very few people make any choices in life for which personally knowing the shape of the earth matters. But since most people have simply accepted what they were taught in school, when faced with a challenge they are unable to back up their beliefs scientifically. So, it's possible to get them to go "hmmmm...." and then we're back to the first paragraph, and flat earth gains more followers.

Then there are the biblical nut cases, but if you can't pick and choose what to accept from the Holy Books, you also can't pick and choose what to reject from it.

Jose

I always liked the Greek method for calculating the radius of the earth based on geometry & the shadows cast by the sun on the same day in different parts of the world - which is a lot easier to coordinate nowadays with telephones or the internet.

ETA: dope, didn't read far enough before responding.

elasto wrote:Conspiracies are only plausible if a very tiny group of people are involved. Once it's open to anyone in the world to discover the truth it's not plausible for the truth to be suppressed.

and as Ben Franklin said, "Three can keep a secret only if two of them are dead."

eran_rathan wrote:I always liked the Greek method for calculating the radius of the earth based on geometry & the shadows cast by the sun

It relies on the sun being very far away (rays treated as parallel). Can you demonstrate that personally?

Jose

Order of the Sillies, Honoris Causam - bestowed by charlie_grumbles on NP 859 * OTTscar winner: Wordsmith - bestowed by yappobiscuts and the OTT on NP 1832 * Ecclesiastical Calendar of the Order of the Holy Contradiction * Please help addams if you can. She needs all of us.

eran_rathan wrote:I always liked the Greek method for calculating the radius of the earth based on geometry & the shadows cast by the sun

It relies on the sun being very far away (rays treated as parallel). Can you demonstrate that personally?

Jose

No, it doesn't. You just need to know some additional distances & angles to determine the distance to the sun (length of your base line, size of your measuring rods, angle of the sun above the horizon, etc.) Its a first-year surveying problem.

"Does this smell like chloroform to you?""Google tells me you are not unique. You are, however, wrong."nɒʜƚɒɿ_nɒɿɘ

And regarding the parallel rays, using phones it is very easy to confirm with others the rays are pretty much parallel - call a friend in the same longitude but a substantially different latitude then you, you both measure the angle a shadow of a pole makes with the north at the same time.

A flat earth and a nearby sun will also cause varying shadow lengths. Over longer distances the discrepancy (between it and spherical/far) becomes evident, but then you run into the sunset thing anyway. (I don't know why flat-earthers don't see sunset as a problem for their model.)

Jose

Order of the Sillies, Honoris Causam - bestowed by charlie_grumbles on NP 859 * OTTscar winner: Wordsmith - bestowed by yappobiscuts and the OTT on NP 1832 * Ecclesiastical Calendar of the Order of the Holy Contradiction * Please help addams if you can. She needs all of us.

... and they get away with it because to the actual decisions most people make in life, it doesn't matter what shape the earth is. Unless you are a tanker ship captain in the southern hemisphere or a GPS systems designer for example, you can get by believing the earth is banana shaped.

Alas, what people believe the shape of the earth is shows what the shape of the earth is in.

Jose

Order of the Sillies, Honoris Causam - bestowed by charlie_grumbles on NP 859 * OTTscar winner: Wordsmith - bestowed by yappobiscuts and the OTT on NP 1832 * Ecclesiastical Calendar of the Order of the Holy Contradiction * Please help addams if you can. She needs all of us.